Few things are more fun in life than tracking shipments and then seeing how it'll eventually reach your front door. But what happens in the in between process? This video shows you what happens when you send something by mail. The drop off locations, the sorting facilities, the delivery process and everything in between. There's a lot of steps! It seems like the life of a package could be made into a Pixar movie like Finding Nemo or something.

The project, which was created by Ruben van der Vleuten, rigged a cardboard box to record the whole shipping journey. He used a cheap $5 digital camera, an Arduino programmed to help the rig sleep and save battery and an external timer circuit to take a three-second video every minute. In addition, he added some tilt switches which would sense movement and record even longer moments (the thinking was if the package was moving, it'd make for more interesting footage).

He actually had to send out the package multiple times to piece together the footage but eventually captured the whole process. It's impressive how efficient it is. [Ruben van der Vleuten via Fast Co]